Within those Bombed-Out Remains of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Book I’d Rendered

In the rubble of a destroyed structure, a solitary image remained with me: a volume I had translated from the English language to Farsi, resting partly concealed in dust and soot. Its front was shredded and stained, its pages curled and burned, but it was still readable. Still communicating.

A Metropolis Under Attack

Two days before, projectiles started hitting the city. There were no alarms, just sudden, powerful explosions. The web was totally cut off. I was in my residence, translating a book about what it means to carry language across languages, and the ethics and worries of inhabiting another’s narrative. As buildings came down, I sat revising a text that suggested, in its subtle way, for the endurance of significance.

Everything stopped. A manuscript my publisher had been about to go to print was halted when the printing house shut down. Shops shut one by one. One night, when the blasts were too imminent, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the library in my apartment, filled with reference books, rare volumes I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Separation and Grief

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous towns – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a image: in the background, a plant was ablaze, dark smoke coiling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly somewhere else, and threat seemed to chase them.

During those days, feelings swept through the city like weather: sudden fear, anxiety, moral outrage at the unfairness, then numbness. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant queries and sources that the work demands.

Outside, blast waves ripped windows from their sashes; at a family member's house, every window was shattered, the furniture lay damaged, household items spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, creating at an easel, declining to let stillness and dust have the ultimate victory.

Transforming Pain

A photograph spread online of a 23-year-old poet who was died when missiles struck a building. Her poem went was widely shared alongside her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an older woman running between alleys, shouting a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some buried recollection. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: turning destruction into art, loss into lines, grief into search.

The Craft as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst ruin, I found myself rendering a fable about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet persisted producing until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all desired – seemingly impossible, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than literary craft: it was an act of resistance, of staying put, of persisting.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his prison cell, asking for more books, insisting that translation become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, hope, practice, anchor, and analogy” all at once.

A Marked Voice

And then came the photograph. I saw it on a platform and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, damaged but surviving, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, stripped of life among the debris and ruins. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but persisting.

I looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a political act”, but I had never felt the complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else crumbles. It is a quiet, unyielding declination to vanish.